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Comment by logn | Hacker News Reader

There's a fine line between prisoner and slave.

Under current law, all physically able inmates who are not a security risk or have a health exception are required to work, either for UNICOR or at some other prison job. Inmates earn from US$0.23 per hour up to a maximum of US$1.15 per hour, and all inmates with court-ordered financial obligations must use at least 50% of this UNICOR income to satisfy those debts.

I think work and education/skills are key to being a healthy human. I just worry that prison labor could easily cross over from being rehabilitative to being exploitative.

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>I just worry that prison labor could easily cross over from being rehabilitative to being exploitative.

I think we've already crossed that line. As far as I know, they don't do it directly, but prison lobbying groups have worked hard to increase the use of mandatory minimum sentences, make sentencing harsher, and keep the war on drugs going.

To me the line is where prisons go from making use of a labor pool that already exists, to actively trying to increase the size of that labor pool.

I see where you're coming from, but I disagree that the degree to which prisons campaign to increase the size of the prisoner labor pool is indicative of exploitation.

Imagine an hypothetical situation in which a prison teaches its occupants to code, pays them market wages, and turns a profit. If demand for programmers was high, this prison would be heavily incentivized to lobby for more prisoners, but you'd be hard-pressed to call the nature of the work "exploitative".

That can only work if, on average, prisoners in prisons are innately better at programming than programmers in offices. Otherwise there may not be a competitive advantage, there may even be a competitive disadvantage.

Maybe, but the point of my hypothetical isn't to prove that prisoners can be good programmers. It's to show that lobbying for more prisoners doesn't necessarily mean that you are exploiting said prisoners. It simply means they are helpful to you.

Any time you create an economic demand for more prisoners, you are exploiting people some of whom are not prisoners yet.

That can only work if, on average, prisoners in prisons are innately better at programming than programmers in offices.

It's been made abundantly clear in the "10x programmer" threads that there is no valid way to measure programmer productivity, so from where exactly does the speculative average here derive?

Are you kidding? Have you ever been inside a prison? No good can come of this idea.

Imagine, just as every other time it has ever been tried, the cheap labor underbids the free-world companies that have to air-condition their offices, and control/prevent worker-worker violence, (raping, killing, and stealing) in order to attract talent. Imagine what that will do to the job market for programmers.

Also, isn't the gov't kind of forbidden to compete with private enterprise, especially the skilled labor markets?

You (and every other responder) have taken my comment completely out of context. Read the post I'm responding too. I was putting forth a hypothetical situation to prove a very specific and explicitly-stated point, not suggesting that prisons should enter the tech industry.

No, I'm not. I replied to your post in the context you provided with your hypothetical example. I stand behind my point for whatever (profitable) industry you wish to apply it to. Or in other words. If a prison seeks to expand its inmate population for any economic reason, that, in itself is exploitation.

You're still arguing against a strawman. The conversation isn't simply about whether or not what prisons do is "exploitation". It's more specific than that. Not is it about whether or not prison lobbying is sending undeserving people to jail. If we were to have that discussion I would likely agree with you.

What we're talking about here, however, is whether prison work programs themselves are rehabilitative or exploitative for the prisoners themselves. My claim is that prisons lobbying to get more people into said programs is irrelevant when considering the quality and fairness of the programs themselves.

Forced labor is not "fair". It is slavery.

I do not accept the idea that by doing a crime, you forfeit your all your human rights.

If the programs are entirely optional, it might be OK. As is, it is utterly exploitative.

I happen to agree, and haven't said anything to the contrary. My point is that forced labor isn't fair, and it wouldn't magically become more fair if prison management neglected to campaign for more prisoners. They're two separate issues.

You (and every other responder) have taken my comment completely out of context.

If your point is so difficult to discern, maybe you haven't made it very well. I think I've deciphered your meaning now. You contend that a non-exploitative prison owner might earn such profits from non-exploitation that she would seek to increase the multitudes upon which she inflicts her non-exploitation.

This proposition has at least a couple of problems. First, a good measure of whether a practice is exploitative or not is whether people would freely choose it, so it's a bad sign when your SOP requires locks on the cells. Second, from a purely commercial perspective, we would expect a "just" prison owner to be indifferent (in the long term) to how many are imprisoned. That is, she would charge society a suitable administration fee, and transfer most resources directly to the charges in her care. A "kind" prison owner would lose money on every prisoner, so she would actually lobby for fewer of them! Then we come to the sort of prison owners we actually have, and it's no surprise they want to transform the nation itself into a vast prison.

How is this different from the call centers that are in prisons now?

That's a good point. It isn't.

These jokers call my home a few times per year. They use inmates on work release, who often try to give you the impression that they are affiliated with a church/charity/etc. They sell normal household products at outrageously inflated prices. http://www.americanhelpinghands.org/ Also Known As U.S. Disadvantaged Industries, Inc.

Manipulating the laws to generate more captives so that you can force them to work for you so that you can make more money is...totally exploitive. That you've thrown in higher pay doesn't change that; it just means they'd treat their slaves better.

It's also a silly hypothetical, in that it misunderstands the motive for prisoner labor. Replace "prison" with "community center":

> Imagine an hypothetical situation in which a community center teaches its occupants to code, pays them market wages, and turns a profit.

Compare potential outcomes. Wouldn't that be a lot easier to run and couldn't you expect much better outcomes? Of course. And it's also true for any other kind of labor; equally paid non-criminals with specific inclinations to the work doing it by choice are going to outperform prisoners if you're paying them equally. Which leads us to the actual reason why prison labor is even a thing at all: because it's coercive and thus artificially cheap. There's no other reason to do it! If prisons had to pay prisoners market wages, there'd be no reason to employ them at all; they could just employ other people. It's just not a valid hypothetical.

It's like saying, "we could get rid of traffic problems by not allowing any vehicles on the road."

Slave labor isn't exploitative simply because slave owners campaign against anti-slavery laws. It's exploitative because the slaves themselves are being forced to work against their will. Slavery would not suddenly become more justifiable if its practitioners adopted a vow of silence with regard to its legality.

The same applies here. Whether or not prison owners campaign for policies that would put more people in prison is irrelevant to the question of whether those prisoners are being treated fairly.

They're not prisoners until they're captured and put in prison. Thus lobbying for more prisoners is a way of exploiting more people, especially the poor, young black men who are most likely to end up in prison. Similarly, lobbying for the capture of more slaves on the west coast of 18th century Africa is a way of exploiting Africans.

Additionally--and I suspect this is what the GP was going for--the lobbying effort clarifies the underlying intentions. The people demanding that prisoners work are doing so not under the banner of exploitation, but under rhetoric about prisoners "giving back to society". That prison organizations are lobbying for more prisoners reveals their real intentions, which is why it's used as evidence of the exploitative nature of the penal system.

You do have a point. I think the lobbying to increase the number of slaves makes it more exploitative, but the line really is at the point where working in prison is required. And actually, there's an even more precise and similarly distasteful word that describes it perfectly: "forced labor camp".

Some might object that the term invokes a comparison to the forced labor camps in countries with much worse human rights situations than our own. But that seems a lot like saying that house slaves didn't count as "real" slaves, because their lot was much better than those forced to work in mines.

To add to what you wrote about the fine line, slavery as punishment is permitted by the 13th amendment:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Is there any way a normal person can give out a punishment for a crime, and let thereby take another person as an actual, lawful, slave?

No, but there are privately run, for-profit prisons....

>There's a fine line between prisoner and slave.

A lot of well-thought-out political ideologies maintain that there isn't a line at all.

Quite right. In fact, you don't need to look any further than the first section of the 13th amendment to find recognition of the fact that there is little to no distinction:

"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

In calling out prison labor as an acceptable form of slavery, the 13th amendment implicitly declares it a form of slavery.

It is a sad day for this country when that loophole is exploited on a wide scale.

Uh, what? A loophole is an unintentional gap in a law. This is obviously an explicit, intentional exception.

I wouldn't say that a loophole needs to be unintentional. I would describe a loophole as a deliberate or accidental ambiguity in a law that allows others to circumvent the intent of the law.

Either way, I don't think it is technically a loophole. Exception is a good word for it.

Fair enough, may not be the best choice of words. I was thinking about it from the perspective that everyone is a lawbreaker to some degree or another; and imagining a situation where detection becomes trivial for all of the minor offences we commit on an ongoing basis.

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